2014-12-28 49 8

Location

On a field next to Bretten

Participants

Plans

It was snowing all night long and as most of the snow has melted away in Speyer, I was sure, there would still be a lot of it outside the Rhine valley. The hash was much to far away to go there by bike in the cold, and I don't want to drive so far by car only for geohashing. But I love to visit the monastery in Maulbronn especially around christmas, so lets see, what I can do with that: how about driving to Bretten near the hash and walk to Maulbronn. I'm totally fine to drive 60KM to do a 25 KM walk :-)

Expedition

The drive to Bretten was rather uneventful. The thermometer in the car shows -2ºC and so qualifies me for a frozen gh-achievement. I left the car at a local shopping center. As the center was closed on sunday there was plenty of free space. From here it was just a KM to walk to the hash. As I had hoped there was a lot of snow and the landscape was great. As I was on a field I had good gps-reception and so I even reached a 0. Then I tried to build a snowman, what appears to be a hard job, as the snow was very dry, and not adhesive at all. So I couldn't build snowballs that were bigger than I could press together with my hands, what leads to a very small snowman. Anyway, it should suffice as a mark to following hashers.

And then I started to walk through a german winter wonderland. After two and a half hours I reached the UNESCO world heritage site Maulbronn; on my way I followed the so called "Eppinger Linie", a line of defense from the late 17. century, which consists mostly of dense cops. I took some photos, ate some cake I brought with me in a place called paradise and walked back. On my way to Bretten I met some strange kings and found the birth house of Doctor Faustus in Knittlingen. An hour later I reached my car again after 4 1/2 hours and 26 KM of walking, very tired but also very pleased.